Adaptive Sampling for Fast Constrained Maximization of Submodular Function

Several large-scale machine learning tasks, such as data summarization, can be approached by maximizing functions that satisfy submodularity. These optimization problems often involve complex side constraints, imposed by the underlying application. In this paper, we develop an algorithm with poly-logarithmic adaptivity for non-monotone submodular maximization under general side constraints. The adaptive complexity of a problem is the minimal number of sequential rounds required to achieve the objective. Our algorithm is suitable to maximize a non-monotone submodular function under a $p$-system side constraint, and it achieves a $(p + O(\sqrt{p}))$-approximation for this problem, after only poly-logarithmic adaptive rounds and polynomial queries to the valuation oracle function. Furthermore, our algorithm achieves a $(p + O(1))$-approximation when the given side constraint is a $p$-extendible system. This algorithm yields an exponential speed-up, with respect to the adaptivity, over any other known constant-factor approximation algorithm for this problem. It also competes with previous known results in terms of the query complexity. We perform various experiments on various real-world applications. We find that, in comparison with commonly used heuristics, our algorithm performs better on these instances.

Non-Monotone Submodular Maximization with Multiple Knapsacks in Static and Dynamic Settings

We study the problem of maximizing a non-monotone submodular function under multiple knapsack constraints. We propose a simple discrete greedy algorithm to approach this problem, and prove that it yields strong approximation guarantees for functions with bounded curvature. In contrast to other heuristics, this requires no problem relaxation to continuous domains and it maintains a constant-factor approximation guarantee in the problem size. In the case of a single knapsack, our analysis suggests that the standard greedy can be used in non-monotone settings. Additionally, we study this problem in a dynamic setting, by which knapsacks change during the optimization process. We modify our greedy algorithm to avoid a complete restart at each constraint update. This modification retains the approximation guarantees of the static case. We evaluate our results experimentally on a video summarization and sensor placement task. We show that our proposed algorithm competes with the state-of-the-art in static settings. Furthermore, we show that in dynamic settings with tight computational time budget, our modified greedy yields significant improvements over starting the greedy from scratch, in terms of the solution quality achieved.